April 2017

6th April is the publication date of my new book Death of a She Devil– a sequel to The Life and Loves… Here’s the jacket and the text on it is:
‘The women of the world gave up romance, subservience and submission, and once empowered, took to hard work, truth and reality. Much good has it done them…’
Ruth Patchett, the original She Devil, is now eighty-four and keen to retire. But who can take up her mantle? Enter Tyler Patchett, our new kind of heroine and Ruth’s grandson. He’s an ultra-confident, twenty-three year old man: beautiful, resentful and unemployed. Tyler won’t be satisfied until he can transition into the ultimate symbol of power and status. A woman. In Fay Weldon’s 1983 classic, The Life and Loves of a She Devil, women fought men for power and won. In 2017, men take a decisive step to get their power back…

October 2016

Oct. 3rd: Newspapers today report me as saying at Henley Festival yesterday: ‘Girls can always get jobs… they can always be cleaners. So they shouldn’t moan.’ I wasn’t recommending it, merely saying it was possible. My mother worked as a cleaner to get me to university. I worked as a cleaner after I’d been to university. It’s no disgrace to be a cleaner, just difficult to find an employer prepared to pay a minimum wage. Men on the other hand, find cleaning jobs the final humiliation and won’t accept them. I wish newspaper persons would accept that a degree of irony comes naturally to me, and distinguish a joke, lightly spoken, from a profoundly anti-feminist statement, which it sounds like taken out of context.

I Love My Love is a comedy of manners, a smart, fun and fast play I wrote in 1980. What is astonishing, and even rather alarming, is how little has changed: Anne, the country mouse, and Cat, the town mouse, would probably be swapping partners rather than husbands, and the life-swap experiment be set up by Channel 4 and not a trendy magazine, but hearts and lives remain the same! Here’s a short trailer for the production: www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp9mJEduMwA&feature=youtu.be

10th March is publication date for my new book Before the War. [See column on the right & www.amazon.co.uk/Before-War-Spoils-Fay-Weldon/]. It will be followed at some point by a book called After the War, and the overall title for the two books is The Spoils of War.

February 2016

The Life and Loves of a She Devil on Radio 4 / 21st & 28th February

Very happy with the BBC’s new radio adaptation of my novel. It’s in two hour-long episodes, starting on Sunday 21 February at 3pm, and continuing on Sunday 28 February at 3pm on Radio 4. Both episodes are repeated at 9pm on the following Saturdays [27 February and 5 March] and will be available on iplayer for a month after transmission. It’s part of a series of dramas on Radio 4 under the title ‘Riot Girls’.

Not sure what the BBC mean by ‘Riot Girls’! But they’ve done a great job, staying true to the book while cleverly adapting the novel to less than half the running time of the 4-part TV version. In the Daily Telegraph Gillian Reynolds calls it ‘ingenious, funny and instructive’. The Guardian says ‘It’s refreshing to hear a new adaptation of Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She Devil. It’s as wicked and deliciously absurd as when it first came out in 1983, with Ruth sieving the dog hairs out of the soup as she plots her revenge against Mary Fisher, her husband’s carefree and pretty mistress. “I must ignore his way of diminishing me by praising women younger, prettier and more successful and sleeping with them if he can,” she chants, in the litany of the good wife. All in all, Riot Girls shows that the fight for equality isn’t won, but it’s glorious to air the dirty laundry on radio.’

June 2015

An article I wrote on nips and tucks for the US magazine More: Read article [They don’t put a current month’s issue online until the next month’s print version is out, around 23rd June in this case: http://www.more.com/ ].

On 16th June I’m doing a turn at The Oldie Literary Lunch: 12.00, Simpson’s-in-the-Strand.www.theoldie.co.uk/literary-lunchesSTOP PRESS: Alas, I have had to cancel my appearance here because of a medical problem.

Review by Kate Saunders in The Times 31.1.15:‘This collection of Fay Weldon’s short stories spans four decades, and in the introduction, Weldon describes looking back over her work as a “disturbing experience”. They brought back strong memories of particular times for her, and no wonder: since the 1970s she has been putting her finger on the clash between the real lives of women and how they are bent out of shape by other people’s expectations. Weekend, first published in 1978, is Weldon at her blistering best, blowing a hole in the idea that a working mother can ever achieve a perfect work-life balance. Martha has a job that is no trouble at all; the hard labour is at home, where she is at the mercy of a husband who insists on spending every weekend in a supposedly idyllic cottage. Times have changed, and Fay Weldon is one of the people who changed them.’

On February 12th my publishers Head of Zeus are bringing out an anthology of my short stories: twenty-one of the total of five times that number that I’ve written. Although most have seen the light elsewhere some have not; the book also includes my new hundred-page novella The Ted Dreams in print form for the first time. Here follows what I say in the introduction to this collection:

During the four decades over which these stories were written the relationship between men and women in the West has changed out of all recognition. In the seventies women still endured the domestic tyranny of men, in the eighties we found our self-esteem, in the nineties we lifted our heads and looked about, and in the noughties – well, we went out to work. We had to.

The stories from the seventies, I notice, tend to be long and serious, those from the busy two thousands, shorter. Everyone’s busy. By the 2014 novella, various chickens from these last decades have come home to roost, while social media and big pharma wreak their own special havoc. Some things don’t change, of course. Like mother-love; and children learning to put up with second best. Like mother-love; and children learning to put up with second best. The wife may become the partner, but she goes on making, mending, patching broken lives the same as before.

Reading through my hundred-odd stories was a disturbing experience. Delving into one’s past writing is like delving into memories of one’s own life for an autobiography – there is so much concentrated, even painful experience here. Fiction these stories may be, but the feeling-tones of yesterdays are bound to come surging back. Women’s bodies go on betraying them, desire goes on trumping common sense. The sadistic male artist seems perennial, his poor masochistic moll up to her arms in soapsuds, admiring him.

Most of the tales in this book have been collected before; a few have appeared only in newspapers, magazines or on the radio. A couple are unpublished: the novella had an initial outing as an e-book but is paper published for the first time. Most of them were written as interruptions of whatever novel I was writing at the time (Alopecia, for example, must have been a kind of interjection into the comparative frivolity of Little Sisters). It seems wiser to get new ideas out of my head and onto the page than keep them seething away inside it. These stories often read, I can see, more like concentrated mini novels than classic short stories.

It was only when I wrote my first short stories, unasked for and uncommissioned that I could persuade myself that I was any kind of proper writer. Since I began writing fiction in 1966 I’d found myself writing non-stop in response to requests for television and radio dramas, stage plays, novels, fulfilling contracts and meeting deadlines. But perhaps the fact that I could do that was more to do with my training in advertising than from any genuine talent? Perhaps all I’d been doing was responding to requests in order to pay the rent and keep a family? Not initiating my own ideas like a proper writer? I trusted the incomparable Giles Gordon, my literary agent from 1966 until he died in 2003, to market what I produced. Which he unfailingly did. So I gained confidence.

Then the short began to creep surreptitiously into the long fiction. In Leader of the Band (1988) I added three only obliquely relevant short stories. Fiction crept into ‘non-fiction’: in Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen (1984) I had to warn to readers the ‘I’ in the book was not me, albeit she bore my name. In Mantrapped (2004) I stirred fiction into autobiography to work out whether one can truly separate the writer’s personal life from what she makes up. I decided that you couldn’t.

But I have always had a try-try-try-again approach to writing: nothing ends up quite as you meant it to, which is why one sighs and starts again, in the hope that this time you will get it right. Of course you never will. But this way you get an awful lot of different kinds of books written – to the despair of one marketing executive who shook her finger at me at a meeting and said, ‘You write consistent product, we’ll sell it.’

So many changes have come to pass in the last four decades to disturb the equanimity of the writer. By the nineties most of us were writing with computers – it was so fast, so easy, and the mouse outran the brain. Unconsidered first, not second, thoughts reached the page. Writing by hand went out of fashion. I held out until about 1995. I am not at all sure that the change to the digital text has been a blessing. The computer depends for its very existence on disambiguity; it deals with yes-no certainties. ‘Perhaps’ doesn’t get a look in. Every sentence means what it says and only what it says, and the ease of change for the writer is so swift and unlaborious that any hint of paradox, any sense of the opaque, is removed.

And then the e-book came along, the naked text without the frills of publisher’s advocacy, jacket, blurb, writer’s photo: Look at me! Read this book! The text must now stand alone, without defences. Readers, who once liked to settle down with a good book when they had peace and time to think now increasingly read e-books when they are on the move. It’s no surprise that plot-rich, contemplation-light genre novels leave literary novels lagging behind. ‘Good’ writing is so much to do with an aesthetic, with a resonance of language which is more apparent on paper than on a screen.

The Other Side always seems to hover over my work – alternative realities always threatening to break through, scaring us out of our wits and sometimes into them. In The Ted Dreams it finally steps into ours.

December 2014

October 2014

My new novella The Ted Dreams, a sci-fi ghost story written especially to suit the ebook format, is out now – initially on Kindle alone. I hope you enjoy it. Do you notice a difference in style between this and my normal writing? For further explanation see my blog quoted in 2nd & 3rd links below.

October 2013

August 2013

FAY WELDON: Why I’m still dieting at 82 – it’s the habit of the habit of a lifetime thanks to the size-obsessed fashion industry
Will we ever call it a truce, the fashion industry and I? Having reached the age of 82 I’ve spent a lifetime rebelling against its strictures; its refusal to put clothes on.Read article

Articles:

Visits to Norway and Denmark:

Norwegian interviews:Fay Weldon on Norwegian TV
(The interview starts at 28 minutes into the programme. Alternatively click here to download an view a version onto your computer.)

Danish TV interview (interview in English – starts at about 50 secs)

Latest book

In The Life and Loves of a She Devil women fought men for power and won. But four decades later the fight continues on a new front…

Ruth Patchett, the original She Devil, is eighty-four and keen to retire. She has worked hard to make the world as she wants it: women triumphant, men submissive. Now she is tired. Her business is done. The mantle of power and influence is up for grabs.

Who can take up the role? Valerie Valeria, hot shot millennial, is ready and eager for power to inherit…

Before the War

Before the War is my last book: it’s about – well, lots of things. Primarily about how looks dictate our destiny, how pretty girls flourish while plain girls don’t, and how it isn’t fair. It’s about how Vivvie – too tall, plain, Aspergery rich girl – manages to subvert her fate and die happy and a saint: but has to fight her beautiful but wicked mother Adela (of Long Live the King!) to get there. It’s about the world of London publishing between the two World Wars. It’s about how international tensions mirror family dysfunction. It’s about how the charismatic and faithless thriller writer Sherwyn Sexton (Vivvie’s husband – she has to buy him) confuses himself with his fictional swashbuckling hero. It’s about how love wins out in the end: just about. I hope it’s funny when it’s not being sad.

Anyway… (I nearly titled the book Anyway but was dissuaded) that’s the book I believe I’ve written. The reader may see something entirely different. Over to you.

Mischief

In February 2015 my publishers Head of Zeus brought out out an anthology of my short stories: twenty-one of the total of five times that number that I’ve written. Although most have seen the light elsewhere some have not; the book also includes my new hundred-page novella The Ted Dreams in print form for the first time.